ALBUM: Up to Date (1971)
MVC Rating: 2.5//$
This album has two fun bubblegum singles: I’ll Meet you Halfway and Doesn’t Somebody Want to be Wanted. Besides these two hits for the TV teeny bop band of the 1970s, the album contains innocuous filler, many from the professional songwriting team of Wes Ferrell and Gerry Goffin.
I went into this album hoping there’d be a surprise hidden gem but nah. It’s all pretty mediocre stuff. But I like the hits.
If you don’t already know it, David Cassidy and Shirley Jones are the only ones who had record time along with their camera time on the insipid TV show The Partridge Family. But I watched it — heck I was 11 years old and kind of liked the notion of screaming girls chasing me, um, David around.
The Cowsills, the Rhode Island family band who actually did play their own instruments, were the inspiration for the TV show. If memory serves me the TV producers wanted the family but not Mrs. Cowsill — the mom. Not because she wasn’t a good musician, but because Shirley Jones, who starred in Oklahoma, wanted this chance of being a Rock and Roll mother as she rolled into her middle age.
Oh well, I like the Cowsills better.